Something that struck me in both of the sessions, and in the classroom over the two weeks since I returned, is the importance of precision in the terms we use, and how the language we use when naming things impacts on our perception of them.
I am a Certified ScrumMaster, and I feel that Scrum provides a very useful set of techniques for running an Agile project. However, some of the Scrum languages set us up for problems when communicating with people who haven’t “drank the cool-aid”.
Here are two of my pet peeves:
- We talk about the importance of self-organising teams and treating everyone equally – one of the Agile Manifesto principles is: “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done”. Yet we call the person who is supposed to be the servant leader on the team ScrumMaster – “master” implies command and control and many managers who I’ve spoken to believe that is what the role is about.
- Another of the Manifesto principles is “Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” Yet we call the time box we do work in a sprint – software development is a marathon, not a sprint. Teams that actually try to sprint continuously quickly wear themselves out.
Am I just being petty or does language matter?
Posted by Shane Hastie